Thursday, July 27, 2006

Mad scientist releases non-killer bees in Surrey

The stupidity of scientists never ceases to surprise or alarm. New Scientist reports the insane activities of a Dr. Tom Ings at Queen Mary, University of London.(Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2006.01199.x).(See also Daily Telegraph report July 13th 2006. Forestry.org )

In a standard experiment in bucket chemistry i.e what will happen if we do x and we stand and watch. He released commercial bumblebees into the wild (Bombus terrestris dalmatinus) which are used in large volume , usually from Dutch sources for pollinating tomatoes in closed cycle greenhouse systems - i.e the bees cannot escape.

"We wanted to determine whether or not escaped commercial bees could survive in the UK countryside," says the intrepid lunatic Tom, aware (one hopes as any cursory review of the literature will show), that non-endemic species of plants and animals can be invasive and more specifically that non endemic commercial bumblebees have established themselves in the wild in Japan and Chile.

Well this bone headed guy installed 7 colonies of the native B. terrestris audax and seven of the imported B. terrestris dalmatinus near Egham, Surrey.

They installed devices to narrow the entrance to colonies to prevent imported queens escaping ( 100% effective I am sure) and collected males before they were able to leave. He found the answer ...""Unfortunately, we found that they could". Presumably after having obtained a licence for the release from DEFRA.(?) See Legal Footnote.

Commercial colonies were unsurprisingly better at foraging for nectar than native bees, and the bees were consistently larger. They also produced more queens capable of flying off and founding new hives, than did native colonies living in the same environment.

Alarmingly, the commercial subspecies not only created the largest colonies but also set them up the most readily. This could lead to the aliens outcompeting native bumblebees, warns the percipient Ings.

Japan understood the threat some time ago and imposed strict restrictions on bee importation. But many others, including the UK, US and Mexico,Austyralia * (Footnote) have yet to take action.